GLOBAL SYSTEMIC CRISIS: Oil will crash

Commodities: Oil will crash and then rise

The LEAP team doesn’t share the optimism on shale oil and future US energy independence. We think the production boom is a temporary flash in the pan. We have come to the conclusion that the importance of WTI (US market) as a world oil benchmark has been diminished and that Europe Brent is now the World Oil trade’s global benchmark. We think that oil is neither a good investment nor a hedge against inflation...

President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.8 trillion spending blueprint on Wednesday that strives to tame runaway deficits, raising taxes on the wealthy and trimming popular benefit programs. In aiming for a compromise between Republicans who refuse to raise taxes and Democrats who are seeking to protect the benefit programs, he managed to make some on both sides unhappy...

The EU has today agreed ground-breaking new rules forcing oil, gas, mining and logging companies to publish details of the payments they make to governments for access to natural resources around the world...

Have China’s exports finally gotten real? After three months of torrid growth that many saw as in the realm of unbelievable, China’s March exports rose 10 percent, below the 11.7 percent economists had predicted, China’s customs announced April 10. Each of the three previous months, exports had exceeded expectations by at least 7.5 percentage points...

A growing number of Federal Reserve policymakers favor scaling back the Fed's "easy money" policies by midyear and ending them by December if the labor market continues to improve, according to minutes of its March meeting released Wednesday...

One professor of politics called the measure “the verge of being neo-secessionist,” and another said it was reminiscent of how Southern states objected to the Supreme Court’s 1954 integration of public schools...

The financial crisis is over and the recession ended in 2009. But one of the federal government's biggest social welfare programs, which expanded when the economy convulsed, isn't shrinking back alongside the recovery...

Consumer watchdogs, Internet activists and European farmers are gearing up to fight the planned trade agreement between Europe and the United States. Many in Europe are worried that politicians will make backroom deals at the expense of consumers...

On the night of 6 October 2008, Thorfinnur Omarsson got a phone call. He had just quit his job at an Icelandic TV station and was looking forward to a "quiet time" as he was about to go back to study. It did not turn out that way...

As I observe Team Abe in action at the helm of the Bank of Japan and elsewhere, a rather terrifying passage from a poem by William Hughes Mearns comes to mind: “Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t ...

With the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan, New Delhi must prepare for contingencies

With US troops recently handing over the last detention facility in Afghanistan to their Afghan counterparts, the endgame in that country has well and truly begun. The road ahead is tricky. While all foreign combat troops are set to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the Taliban continue to remain defiant.

Financial crises in the United States and Europe mean the world needs a new, more stable global reserve currency, and rapidly rising trade in renminbi. In the foreign exchange market, for example, RBS Group figures show that the volume of renminbi trade is now about $5-6 billion a day, double of what it was a year ago...